New Starts

Happy New Year!

New Starts was today’s prompt from Capture Your 365. And it was the perfect prompt for me. I need a new start and I’m trying hard to start new. I’m starting with a new planner (Filofax personal size with DIYfish inserts) and a new plan. I wasted a lot of time last year – well, in my defense we did do a whole lot of traveling so that took up some (a lot) of time. But I still wasted time. I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to. When I had time I mostly felt scattered and not really sure what I want to do. But I have new goals this year and I’m hoping with my new planner I can accomplish these goals.

My word for 2016 is STRETCH. I need to stretch myself in the things I already do and stretch myself to try new things. I also need to stretch literally, like do yoga.

My goals for 2016 are:

• Research my family using ancestry.com and other tools
• Document the travel we will be doing this year
• Document my life – maybe Project Life, maybe some other way
• Read More (I want to read at least 52 books this year)
• Handle money better
• Make art quilts
• Become healthier (eat better, move more)
• Create a cozy and colorful home
• Study Wicca
• Blog on a regular basis

And finally, my hobbies for this year (I have to put a limit here because I tend to want to try everything and I end up doing nothing):

• writing
• photography
• quilting
• art journaling
• project life or something like that

Learning to Paint

I want to learn how to paint. I can make random lines but that’s about it. So, to that end, I’ve started reading Paint Mojo by Tracy Verdugo. The first exercise was to paint some symbols. I did. I’m not sure they are my symbols, but I painted some symbols. Not very well, but I painted them. Steps.

Then you add paint and sprays and scratching and stamps and words or anything else you wish. The painting looks pretty bad and random but after you are done painting you take a mask and find some interesting portions within the larger painting. I found some.

 I like the heart here. There’s a bird behind the art. A bird is one of my symbols. I guess a heart is also

Flowers are definitely one of my symbols although I’m obviously not good at them. Circles are a symbol of mine also.

I tend to relate to sky symbols like clouds and suns. And animals like birds, butterflies, dragonflies. I think this is my favorite portion.

More flowers. This was a fun exercise.

I’m Back and The War of Art

I’m back. I haven’t been blogging, I haven’t been making art, I haven’t been writing, I haven’t been creating. In my defense we traveled A LOT these last 6 or so months. From New Orleans to Lake Superior to Rapid City (my new official city and state – I even got my drivers license while we were there) to where we are now in Port Aransas, TX. It’s been a lot of driving, a lot of moving, and a lot of sightseeing. I’ve taken a whole bunch of photos but have yet to do anything with them. But now that we’re settled by the ocean I’m hoping to change that.

I’ve been reading The War of Art lately about how resistance to what we are supposed to do is the enemy of getting things done. And yes, I know that that idea, or something similar, have been written about before (The Artist’s Way comes to mind) but this book got mentioned in something I was reading and seemed to hit a nerve so I bought it. And yes, it was something I needed right now. I’ve been using resistance (in my case all the traveling we’ve doing) as my excuse as to why I haven’t gotten anything done. Well, I’m back now. I even started Morning Pages again. And I now require me to sit down for 30 minutes (I’m starting small, don’t judge) and write. It may not be the most enlightened, or even good, writing ever done, but at least it’s getting done. And I will also require me to spend at least 20 minutes creating an art journal page. It’s been a really long time, maybe a year or so, that I’ve done one of those.

This is the art journal page I did on Wednesday. I obviously didn’t get very far with this one. I was thought about going back to it and finishing it more but then I decided that I’m just going to take what I do every day as it is. I’m not going to worry about how nice, or not nice, it is. I’m just going to throw it up here on the blog. Hopefully the journal pages, and writing I’m doing on the blog every day, will, a year from now, show that I’ve made some good forward progress in both endeavors.

I did not get a journal page done yesterday. I sat down to do something using Corel Painter and found that OS X El Capitan has done something to that program to the point that my Bamboo tablet gets really really really slow when using a paint brush. And the only purpose of creating in Corel Painter is to use a brush. I tried my tablet in Photoshop and the brushes there work just fine. But I was frustrated enough to let Mr. Resistance take over.

But I can certainly create in Photoshop and maybe I’ll can get over my fear and use real brushes on real paper with real collage items. I’m not really saying that digital art is less then hand made art, but it is different. I think that if I want to call myself an artist I should be able to do work on paper in addition to a screen. But Mr. Resistance gets really loud anytime I get near paper.

When I decided yesterday that I needed to bring this blog back to life I realized that I never set a mission statement for it. And maybe that lack of mission is preventing me from using the blog to best of my ability. Well, we’ll see anyway, as I’ve decided that now’s as good a time as ever to create that mission statement.

So, the mission of this blog is to:

• write daily on the progress, or lack thereof, with my writing, my art work, my photography;
• show daily the art work I’ve created either presently or in the past;
• document the redecoration of our motorhome, as resistance seems to be getting in the way with that endeavor also;
• document how I’m conquering resistance;
• talk about how Morning Pages are helping (or not);
• discuss my ongoing struggle with deciding on a Planner vs a Bullet Journal vs using my iPhone for task management (I know, tough life I have);
• learn how to write about the sights we see when traveling rather than using photographs to tell the story.

I guess that’s it, at least for now. I can always add more as I go along.

Introspection

Wild and Free

Another Be Still attempt. I think I’m better at outside photography than the still lifes inside.

Ugly Still Life

I’m working my way through the Be Still class by Kim Klaussen and this is my first attempt at an actual still life photograph. I have to say I kind of hate it. It’s way too monochromatic and the perfume bottle sort of fades into nothing. The background is too wrinkled (it was the only light fabric/background I had.) Ah well, you must try before you succeed, or something like that.

Peace

Another of my stillness photographs.

Project Life – the start of Clearwater, FL

We were in Clearwater, FL for 2 weeks and I ended up with 6 pages for this area. We did a lot so I have a lot to show and tell. Here are the first two pages.

 

Being Still

I’m taking the Be Still class by Kim Klassen which is really about still life. However, I’m interpreting it as stillness. I’m mostly not going with still life because I really don’t have a lot of props here in my motorhome (although I could probably find something that would work if I looked hard enough) and also because I like to photograph outside.

I think I caught stillness here.

In other news, I no longer have a DSLR to use. It came to a tragic end when one of the cats chased the other cat onto the table where my camera was sitting and the camera went flying off and landed not so gently on the floor. To get it fixed would cost a minimum of $200 plus shipping charges and a new one of the same type would cost about $300. I wanted to upgrade eventually anyway so I’m taking this as a sign that I should upgrade now. I haven’t decided which camera I’m going with yet. It will be either a Nikon D7000 or a Nikon D7100. $300 separates the two cameras so it is kind of a hard decision. I’d like the D7100 but will it really be worth that much extra? I just don’t know. I’m hoping this camera with be my last camera so I may just go with the D7100 for that reason. We’ll see. I guess I need to make up my mind soon as we’ll be leaving this campground next week and I’m not sure about receiving packages in the next one.

Project Life – The Start

It took me awhile to figure out how I was going to do (or even if I wanted to do) project life pages. I really thought I wanted to do a paper version this year. I figured that would be a good way to save the ephemera that I collect from the places we visit. But it never happened, I never got motivated to start. That’s when I realized that I really like doing digital much more. So that’s what I’m doing this year. Here are the first two pages. (I haven’t figured out an intro page yet.) What I did decide is that I’m not doing it by week. I’m going to do it by campground, or, more precisely, the town we are staying in. This is the first few days of the new year. We left St. Marys, GA and spent a few days in Orlando, FL.